The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on Tuesday to a trio composed of Pierre Agostini (France), Ferenc Krausz (Hungary/Austria) and Anne L’Huillier (France/Sweden) for their work on the movement of electrons inside atoms and molecules.
The researchers were rewarded for creating “extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes during which electrons move or change energy,” the jury said. The three physicists’ advances “made it possible to explore processes that were so fast that they were previously impossible to follow,” he added.
Pulses of light on the order of attoseconds
The three physicists succeeded in creating pulses of light on the order of attoseconds. “An attosecond is so short that there are as many in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe,” notes the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Anne L’Huillier, who teaches at Lund University in Sweden, is the fifth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in physics since 1901.
She explained this Tuesday that she received the call from the jury while she was giving a lesson. “I am very touched, there are not that many women who have won the prize, so it is very, very special,” she reacted to the Academy.
Pierre Agostini is a professor at Ohio State University in the United States. Ferenc Krausz is director of the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
Already a Frenchman last year
Last year, the Swedish Academy rewarded the Frenchman Alain Aspect, the American John Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger, pioneers of the revolutionary mechanisms of quantum physics.
The prize comes with a reward of eleven million crowns (920,000 euros), the highest nominal value (in Swedish currency) in the more than century-old history of the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Foundation announced in mid-September that it had increased the amount of this endowment thanks to its improved financial situation.
The Nobel season continues in Stockholm on Wednesday with chemistry, before the highly anticipated literature prizes on Thursday and the peace prizes on Friday, the only prize awarded in Oslo. The most recent economy price closes the vintage next Monday.